I got accosted on Facebook by a well meaning but I think misguided soul who asked, if banning guns doesn’t stop rampages, why are there few gun rampages in highly gun phobic Europe? My impression is that partly there are more knifing problems, and partly that there is not very much news coverage afforded to events in Europe when a loon with a gun gets looney with that gun.
Obviously you've forgotten about the recent Norwegian mass murder ... where at least three times the number that were killed in Newtown died (mostly young adults).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers#School_massacres
US has 5 out of the 15 listed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers:_School_massacres
US has the most incidents listed, with China not far behind.
I was wondering if population size was a factor, but then noticed India not on the list at all.
Also missing from the list were terror attacks (Chechens in Belsen, Palestinian suicide bombers, etc.)
Was there not a stabbing incident in China last week?
Until the postwar period, and even now to some extent, Europe has had less of the rootless, anonymous anomie that we have in the States, with people wandering around chasing their personal rainbows.
In Europe, society was highly organized and "contextualized" (bzzz, bzzz), so that every person had some sort of sense of his "place". People didn't move 500 miles at the drop of a hat, or because their employer had a policy of handing people long-distance transfers (Exxon and Conoco used to do this deliberately, in order to make the Company the pole star of the employee's existence -- theoretically), or because a newspaper printed the headline, GOLD!!.
If you were born in Stettin, you lived your life in Stettin, you knew lots of people in Stettin and they knew you, and you were not the sort of disconnected, dysrfunctional loner that so many of these shooters are. You always had people near you who were interested in your welfare -- your rabbi or priest, your relatives, your in-laws, people at work, people where you shopped.
Outbursts like these are the downside of freedom. The "Progs" will now argue for less freedom.
That's my theory, anyway.
>>>I got accosted on Facebook by a well meaning but I think misguided soul who asked, if banning guns doesn’t stop rampages, why are there few gun rampages in highly gun phobic Europe? My impression is that partly there are more knifing problems, and partly that there is not very much news coverage afforded to events in Europe when a loon with a gun gets looney with that gun.<<<
Different cultures have different ways to express their lunacy. Tell your friend that gun-phobic Europe used guns to kill tens of millions of their fellow citizens in organized massacres for decades, right up to the 1990s in Bosnia and Kosovo. Remind your friend that there are many different cultures even in Europe, ranging from Switzerland, where everyone has a gun, to Great Britain, where guns are for the most part illegal to possess. Guess which place has the higher rate of violent crime?
My father grew up in New York City in the 1940s. He told me that he used to carry his .22 rifle to school, give it to the gym teacher, and then use it for marksmanship practice during class. No schoolyard massacres back then, even though the technology for firearms hasn’t changed that much. You used to be able to buy semiautomatic pistols through the mail for cheap. No schoolyard massacres then, either.
In fact, there are places on Earth in which strict gun control and low rates of gun violence both occur - Japan, for instance. But we’re not Japanese, and they’ve got a whole suite of problems that we don’t have. Culture makes a difference.
Maybe it’s just good fortune, but up in Alaska, the few people who called for gun control on Facebook after the Connecticut killings were told that it was disgusting to use the event as a soapbox for political purposes.
And they’re right - it is disgusting.
One other thing: if you’re accosted on FB, maybe it’s time to unfriend.